Anthropological Video Games

A cluster of teen-agers gathered around a small table, and passersby could hear them exclaim, “Asian! Yeah, I knew it!” and “Aryan? That seems ridiculous.” They hovered over two iPads in the Grand Gallery of the Museum of Natural History during the Margaret Mead Film Festival, playing a game called “Guess My Race.” It was one of five video games in the Mead Arcade; the others included “The Cat and the Coup,” which traces the downfall of Iran’s first democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and “Sweatshop,” in which you hire and fire workers for your loathsome factory.

Aiding the swarms of museum patrons who stopped to play were volunteers from Games for Change, a New York City-based nonprofit that encourages the development of what it calls “social-impact games.” (All of the games at the arcade are also available for free through the organization’s Web site.) I sat down at a laptop to try my hand at running a sweatshop. To a bouncy techno soundtrack, the boss floor manager, who keenly evoked Hitler, spewed insults and directions—”Lazybones! How are you today? Shh-h-h-h. I don’t care!”—and the orders started pouring in for shoes, shirts, hats, and bags.

I selected an adult worker, rather than a child, to box up hats on the assembly line, and asked the volunteer, “Do you find that most people choose children to work?”

“By the end, you have to,” she said. “You get to the point where child workers are the only way to make money.”

“So, are you supposed to feel a sense of accomplishment in this game? Or is the point for you to just feel terrible about yourself?”

“You feel good when you complete a level. But then you feel bad when your workers start to die and lose their limbs.”

When I reached the third level, I sent out too many unfinished orders, and my contract was ripped in half. The boss lambasted me—“I should belt you, moron!”—and, as I continued to play, I began to skip past his angry monologues, as well as the interjections of a child worker who popped up at the bottom of the screen to plead for decent treatment. My workers kept dying of dehydration, so I begrudgingly had to invest in a water fountain. The longer I played, the more each moving part—workers, children, hats—became abstracted into the image of one big machine.

When playing a game, one always takes on a role (banker, shortstop, sword-bearing elf), which involves both identifying with that character and maintaining an awareness of yourself as the player. You’re simultaneously a participant and an observer. From a parallel stance, anthropologists have studied the way games teach members of a society to follow cultural rules—often a difficult, stressful undertaking—by establishing play as the safe environment for instruction. Each of these anthropological video games raises the stakes of that dynamic—because you, the player, are playing a game that has been modelled after conditions of the real world.

In the game “Hunt for the Noor Stone,” the player meets characters around different sites in Baghdad, circa 1263—a judge, a mathematician, a caliph—and has the option of pausing to learn a new word or practice, or, alternatively, bypassing the lesson to advance in pursuit of the mythical stone. A man at the port on the Tigris explains, “As-salam alaykum is Arabic and it means ‘Peace be upon you.’ It is important to always greet the people of Baghdad by saying this and respond ‘Wa-alaykum salam.’ ” The player is given two options to respond: a) “Thank you for explaining this to me, as-salam alaykum. What do you know about the Noor stone?” or, b) “Whatever! Have you seen the Noor stone?” By the end of the level, the player is tested, and only by demonstrating your knowledge of Arabic culture can you acquire the stone.

In 1940, Margaret Mead created a card game along with her husband, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Called “Democracies and Dictators,” its cards contained instructions such as “Dictator! Crippled Industries: You have put your leading industrialists into concentration camps. (lose a card in 5).” Mead wrote that it was based on “the basic ideas that democracies and dictators play by different rules and work with different values.” She tried to sell the idea to Parker Brothers, but it was never produced for public consumption. The games on display at the Mead Arcade have been markedly more successful. “Sweatshop” had a million plays during its first three months, and “The Cat and the Coup” has received acclaim from gamers around the world—including one German reviewer who wrote that it is “like Monty Python being dropped in a bowl full of Persian kitsch.”

On the other side of the gallery wall—behind the big screen that publicly aired my humiliating attempt to lead Mossadegh’s spirit back in time—was the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians. It’s unmistakably the oldest hall in the museum; the cases filled with relics from the Kwakiutl and the Tlingit rest under the shadows of towering totem poles. Behind the wood and glass displays are weapons, masks, musical instruments, and, in the section on the Thompson Indians, a selection of games—darts, birch-bark playing cards, a hoop and spear set. There are games of skill and games of chance, games of physical strength and games of mental dexterity—for developing skills applicable in the real world (hunting, counting). The games hearken to another place and time, which, in this setting, one can encounter only as a visitor from a distance. A museum-goer looking through the glass knows only that they played, but not how.

But if games train players in the rules of culture, what happens when those rules become too complicated to follow, or, perhaps, obsolete? Settling down to play “Guess My Race,” the player looks at photographs of ten faces—no artifacts here, the subjects are familiarly modern. You choose from six possible races that vary widely from one round to the next—descriptions might be nationalities, skin colors, religions, or loaded epithets like “Illegal” or “East Coast.” The player might have to select from options that would seem to be simultaneously plausible (i.e., Asian versus Indonesian, or Black versus Caribbean) with answers that suggest race is self-defined, not regionally or ethnically determined.

On one slide, a blonde woman is pictured, with a scarf wrapped around her neck. All six options are “white.” Thinking this was a technical error, I clicked on the first one. The answer popped up, “Yes, I consider myself white,” with all six boxes lit green. The next slide explained, “According to this woman’s answers to our survey question, there was nothing to note about her race…. Many whites think that race doesn’t play much of a role in their lives.” For decades, anthropologists have grappled with questions about whether the idea of race is a valuable concept, and the danger (or for some, the detached privilege) of writing off its significance. What was odd about “Guess My Race” was that it seemed alternately revelatory and degrading—not unlike ethnographic practice. It tested a player’s aptitude for superficial judgments, while reinforcing assumptions about race as a designation to be guessed at. As the game demonstrates, the rules of race are becoming even harder to grasp, and more individualized. A correct answer, a point scored, does little to instruct players about how to follow those rules. It does, however, allow a moment’s pause—the key to the game is hesitation.

One of the few I got right (my score was a pathetic two out of ten) was a guy with caramel skin, who, I guessed correctly, was Puerto Rican. But then, just as I felt like I was getting the hang of this, his commentary flashed across the screen, explaining, “I think people just see me as sexy.”

Betsy Morais, formerly a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff, is an editor at Harper’s Magazine.